Schedule

Notes

While reviewing the volunteer application form for a charity that I'm
thinking of supporting, I grew uncomfortable with the confidentiality
agreement. In particular, I resisted the idea of treating it as "work
for hire" and assigning all my rights to whatever ideas, material, or
processes I might develop while I'm volunteering.

I've come to value the ability to come up with ideas, write about my
experiences, and learn from other people. I want to avoid constraining
that freedom. Just as software developers may take special precautions
not to taint their minds with code that they can't reuse so that they
can avoid questions about the code they produce, I may need to avoid
experiences that add complications to my ability to share and learn.
Private, confidential, or copyrighted material is relatively easy to
delineate, but what about insights and advice? If someone's question
prompts me to collect advice and to write an article that I've been
meaning to do for a while, would I be unable to republish that article
even after removing sensitive information? Maybe that's the price
other people pay to gain experiences they wouldn't otherwise have, but
if I can get similar experiences elsewhere...

The multiple-terminal support in Emacs 23 (CVS) means that I can leave
my main Emacs session running on my laptop, connect to it from the
desktop using SSH, get a graphical display on a big screen, and still
be able to use my laptop if I decide to go off wireless. It also
allows me to fake having a dual-screen Emacs setup. =) Very happy.
This will be good for when I'm writing WickedCoolEmacs, too.

Most of my notes are in Emacs Planner. Handy commands like M-x
remember help me quickly take notes and write down ideas, saving the
text to my blog.

While reading the manual for Org, another PIM for Emacs (yes, another
one!), I decided to give it a try. Org uses Remember, the same quick
note-taking module that Planner does. I wanted to set up Emacs so that
I could remember a note and have it go either to my Planner-based blog
or to my notes file.

M-x remember is a two-step procedure. First, Remember sets up the
buffer and inserts the annotation. After you write the note and press
C-c C-c, Remember passes the note's contents to a handler function.
Because Planner and Org have incompatible annotation functions and
destinations, I needed to override both.

Contact

I'd love to hear about any questions, comments, suggestions or links that you might have. Your comments will not be posted on this website immediately, but will be e-mailed to me first. You can use this form to get in touch with me, or e-mail me at [email protected] .

Page: 2007.10.05

Updated: 2007-10-2321:52:2221:52:22-0400

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